For Mary-Pat Hector, a 2019 graduate of Spelman College and national youth director for the National Action Network (NAN) since 13 years-old, tackling food insecurity on college campuses, growing youth entrepreneurship, sustaining communities, encouraging wellness and fighting for reproductive justice are some of the most salient issues she is addressing in this current moment.
Although her work today is not centered around just one cause or issue, Hector acknowledges that her spirit of activism has blossomed out of her early work in her Stone Mountain, Georgia community to end gun and youth violence nearly a decade ago.
“I realized that I was attending more funerals than graduations, and I realized that people who I went to school with were becoming pregnant and dying,” she recalls. “The only way to kind of resist that was to get involved or try to do something more positive.”
At 10, Hector founded the non-profit Youth in Action USA, with early organizing calling attention to the fact that her community established a new jail at the time, but no new teen centers or spaces for youth to stay involved in extracurricular activities.
After initial outreach failed to yield a response from some community megachurch pastors and political figures, Hector and her group began calling the radio stations. Rev. Al Sharpton, NAN’s founder, answered the phone on her line, Hector says.
“I was pretty much like, ‘You say you’re a community advocate, you say you’re for the uplift and the betterment of people of color, so what are you going to do about people in my community dying in Stone Mountain?’” she says. “Within two hours, his local Atlanta chapter of National Action Network came to Stone Mountain. Ever since then, I’ve been super involved in community activism and organizing with National Action Network, but then also within my everyday life.”
The Metro Atlanta native admits that engaging in community activism and organizing as a young person has its challenges.
